Automated Negotiation Protocol for Collaborative Diagnostic Services Scheduling

More Info
expand_more

Abstract

This paper proposes a negotiation protocol for outpatient diagnostic services scheduling in a collaborative setting where each patient has private preference values over available service time slots and the overall schedule is achieved through negotiation among patients. With the objective of maximizing the social welfare of patients, the key challenge is how to integrate patients' private preference values in time slot allocation decisions such that high-quality solutions which benefit all the patients can be obtained. We use simulated annealing as the optimization meta-heuristic for designing our automated negotiation protocol through which patients collaboratively improve the overall preference value of the solution. The results from our computational study show that the proposed negotiation protocol achieves on average 95% efficiency compared with optimal solutions.